Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Spectator on the Stands of History @ (Art) Amalgamated

Running through Saturday, September 21, the group exhibition
“A Spectator on the Stands of History,” brings together a diverse and
accomplished group of artists, with the resulting dialog reflecting hope, fear,
movement, homage to the past and a glimpse of the future. Its
venue, (Art) Amalgamated, is a project space founded by Gary Krimershmoys in
January 2012, which exhibits an international, multidisciplinary group of
artists that are on the forefront of the contemporary art discourse. Experimentation with mediums, methods,
conceptual quandaries, and sociopolitical engagement are encouraged and
fostered.

Included in “A Spectator ...” is this ensemble of artists
across different media, disciplines, experiences, various kinds and levels of
engagement, and other confluences of creative geographies:

Rob Voerman is a Dutch artist who creates futuristic
communities that construct simultaneous visions of utopia, destruction, and
beauty that reflect on a rapidly changing society. He has exhibited
internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Cobra Museum, Amstelveen;
Bregenzer Kunstverein, Bregenzer (Austria); and the UCLA Hammer Museum, and
many group exhibitions at venues such as University Art Museum, Santa Barbara;
Generali Foundation, Vienna; Museum voor Moderne Junst, Arnem, NL; and the
Museum of Modern Art. Architecture, instability, and deconstruction are central
themes in the two-dimensional work and sculptures of Rob Voerman. His works are
defined by a dialogue between the forms of old archaic appearances of the
farmer’s-life and the modern technically developed society. The improvised
constructions of his works reminds one of the anonymous architecture of sheds
as can be seen on small farms and in gardens. Modern architecture was partially
transformed and integrated by this archaic way of building. In his own words,
Voerman tries “to create the architecture of fictive communities living in
remote areas or occupying existing citylandscapes. The communities will consist
of a mixture of utopia , destruction and beauty.” Voerman’s three-dimensional
works are made of many different materials such as cardboard, glass, plexiglass,
and wood. The sculptures recall the memory of a primitive hut but—at the same
time—the technological achievements of the machine age. In Voerman’s
sculptures, different typologies of architecture, furniture, and machines blend
together. An example is Moonshine (2006), which is a table but at the same time
a maquette of a ruined flatbuilding. The work also functions as a bar and a
smoking area. A bar full of alcoholic drinks is built into the table and there
is an ashtray mounted in it too.

Peter Beard, an artist based in New York and Kenya, has been
widely known for photographs of Africa, African animals, celebrities. He has
documented the history of his relationships with Africa, Karen Blixen, the New
York art scene, the fashion world, Hollywood, and the Kennedy administration.
In addition to creating original artwork, Beard has befriended and collaborated
on projects with many artists including Andy Warhol, Andrew Wyeth, Richard
Lindner, Terry Southern, Truman Capote, and Francis Bacon. In 1996, (shortly
after he was trampled by an elephant), his first major retrospective opened at
the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris, followed by other exhibits in
Berlin, London, Toronto, Madrid, Milan, Tokyo and Vienna. When Beard first went to Kenya in August 1955,
the country’s population was roughly five million, with about 100 tribes
scattered throughout the endless "wild—deer—ness" - it was authentic,
unspoiled, teeming with big game—so enormous it appeared inexhaustible. Everyone
agreed it was too big to be destroyed. Now Kenya's population of over 30
million drains the country's limited and diminishing resources at an amazing
rate: surrounding, isolating, and relentlessly pressuring the last pockets of
wildlife in denatured Africa. The beautiful play period has come to an end.
Millions of years of evolutionary processes have been destroyed in the blink of
an eye. The Pleistocene is paved over, cannibalism is swallowed up by
commercialism, arrows become AK- 47s, colonialism is replaced by the power, the
prestige and the corruption of the international aid industry. This is The End
Of The Game over and over. What could possibly be next? Density and stress—aid
and AIDS, deep blue computers and Nintendo robots, heart disease and cancer,
liposuction and rhinoplasty, digital pets and Tamaguchi toys deliver us into
the brave new world.”

David Birkin, a British artist who currently lives in New
York, explores the language of loss in both the private and political domains
and deals with limitations of visibility, combining original and appropriated
imagery with a conceptual approach. Having written and photographed editorial
commissions on subjects ranging from the deforestation of orangutan habitat in
Borneo to the Afghan Film Institute in Kabul, Birkin has been the recipient of the Sovereign
Art Prize (Barbican, London), Celeste Art Prize (Museo Centrale Montemartini,
Rome) and a National Media Museum bursary, and has exhibited at the Courtauld
Institute, London; The Photographers’ Gallery; and Saatchi New Sensations. His
work was recently shown at the MoMA PS1 Rockaway Dome as part of Expo 1: New
York. He will begin the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in September
2013. Lucy Davies managed to put his work in a nutshell when she wrote in the
Telegraph: “David Birkin works with photography and performance to recount the
ephemeral. His interest lies in the overlap between the two, where the life of
the artwork exists in two places at once –first via the original event, and
second within the visual echo or trace it leaves behind on a single
two-dimensional image. Often these events are constructed by Birkin, but he is
equally adept when drawing from history, plumping his concept until it
positively glows with allusions. The result is a body of work that teases our
struggle and fascination with limits – of perception, existence, knowledge and
death.”

Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid are Russian born, New
York based conceptual artists who collaborated to produce artworks from 1973 to
2003. They are perhaps best known as the founders of SotsArt (СоцАрт), a form
of Soviet Nonconformist Art that combined elements of Socialist Realism and
Western Pop Art in a conceptual framework that also references Dadaism. Komar
and Melamid also collaborated with other artists, for example, Douglas Davis,
Fluxus member Charlotte Moorman, Andy Warhol, among others. Their first
international exhibition was took places in New York, in 1976. Since then, they
have had numerous public commissions and exhibitions throughout the world.
Their works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New
York; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Komar has said he isn't so
concerned that people actually enjoy the work, so long as it provokes thoughts
of free will versus predetermination. To tie that concept into their earlier
work, Komar said, "In our early work, we arrived at [the] definition of
freedom that entailed being free from individual cliches, being free to change
intonations and styles. Individuality lost its stability and its uniqueness.
Now we are searching for a new freedom. We have been traveling to different
countries, engaging in dull negotiations with representatives of polling
companies, raising money for further polls, receiving more of less [the] same
results, and painting more or less [the] same blue landscapes. Looking for
freedom, we found slavery."

Meredith Monk is an American composer, singer,
director/choreographer and creator of new opera, music-theater works, films and
installations. A pioneer in what is now called “extended vocal technique” and
“interdisciplinary performance,” Monk creates works that thrive at the
intersection of music and movement, image and object, light and sound in an
effort to discover and weave together new modes of perception. Over the last
five decades, she has been hailed as “a magician of the voice” and “one of America’s
coolest composers.” Celebrated internationally, Monk’s work—which has always
defied categorization—has been presented by BAM, Lincoln Center Festival,
Houston Grand Opera, London’s Barbican Centre, and at major venues in countries
from Brazil to Syria.

Peter Rostovsky, a Russian born, New York-based artist,
whose work represents the artist’s attempt to reconcile a deep interest in
history with a keen interest in recording the immediate world around him. He
was selected for the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and has exhibited
widely both in the United States and abroad including such venues as the Walker
Art Center, MoMA PS1, the ICA in Philadelphia, SMAK Museum in Ghent and Rauma
Biennale Balticum in Finland. He currently teaches painting at NYU. Rostovsky’s
work attempts to reconcile a deep interest in history with a keen interest in
recording the immediate world around him. Each project begins with a simple
question for him: “How is the past inherited by the present?” For instance, how
does one currently experience the sublime? Or, what constitutes our
contemporary experience of transcendence, ritual, and solidarity? What results
are surprising updates and pictures of the present revealed as at once cliched,
yet rich with repressed cultural meaning and transgressive possibility. Drawing
on art history, film, photography, and the internet, Rostovsky’s paintings
scavenge today’s omnivorous visual culture where paintings by Caspar David
Friedrich rub up against sci-fi illustration and where the project of Modernist abstraction can be read within the
grids of local athletic fields. It is this overlap that compels him—that moment
when one sees the contours of the past reflected through banal conventions of
the present and the image of the outdated, the exhausted, and the reified
glimmering again with new life.

Monika Weiss, a Polish-American artist based in New York,
creates durational, performative and site-specific public projects, as well as
films, drawings, photographs and sculptures, suggesting alternative forms of
knowledge and perception. Originally educated as a classical musician, Weiss is
renowned for the use of her own body as a vehicle of artistic expression. In
2005 Lehman College Art Gallery (City University of New York) organized a
survey exhibition of the artist’s work to date. Solo exhibitions include Museo
de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos (Santiago), Centre for Contemporary Art
Ujazdowski Castle (Warsaw), and Chelsea Art Museum (New York). Weiss’ work has
been also featured at Kunsthaus Dresden, El Museo del Barrio, The Drawing
Center, Montanelli Muzeum, and North Dakota Museum of Art, and is included in
collections of CIFO Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (Miami), Albertina Museum
(Vienna), and Frauen Museum (Bonn). Weiss’ transdisciplinary work examines
relationships between body and history, and evokes ancient rituals of
lamentation as traditionally performed in response to war. Her current work
considers aspects of public memory and amnesia as reflected within the physical
and political space of a city.

As English author, journalist and television personality
Will Self has said: “Life, it is true, can be grasped in all its confused
futility merely by opening one's eyes and sitting passively, a spectator on the
stands of history–but to understand the social processes and conflicts, the
interplay between individual and group, even the physicality of human
experience, we have need of small-scale models.” This show encompasses and
conveys—in an abbreviated way—such physicality, experimentation, and various
kinds of sociopolitical engagement and discourse.

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About Me

Alumnus of Michigan State University. In 1993, elected to Manhattan’s Community School Board #2 by highest vote count of any NYC school board member (re-elected in 1996). Editor and writer who has appeared such venues as Poz, Financial Planning, Art and Understanding, The St. Luke’s Review, The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, Response: a Contemporary Jewish Review, We Are All Friends Here: an Anthology of Provincetown Poets, The Episcopal New Yorker, and Sky: a Michigan Literary Magazine. Long active in Democratic Party Politics. A certified NYC Master Composter.